


notes on a creative process

by Noip13



Category: Hamilton - Miranda, Hamilton - Miranda (Broadway Cast) RPF
Genre: Gen, Gen Work, Meta, Supernatural Elements, Symbolism, Writer's Block, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-05 22:36:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12803859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noip13/pseuds/Noip13
Summary: Lin-Manuel Miranda and a cast of thousands sing the story of the Hamiltons, because history remembers.(Miranda, though, gets a little extra help.)





	notes on a creative process

_Inspiration_.

The last thing he’d expected when he started reading a brick of a book on Alexander Hamilton was for him to truly empathize with a Founding Father. A Founding Father--an old white guy who helped create an _entire country_ two hundred years ago--versus a musician, an ex-high school teacher, the son of two Puerto Rican immigrants? In what universe do those two people line up in any way? And yet…there were inescapable parallels between him and a man that lived centuries ago. Lin was a writer, a composer, a performer. Well, Hamilton had written and composed and performed and spoken with every degree of the fire Lin could feel broiling under his skin. Especially the writing. He’d written like a goddamn _madman_.

Hamilton had lived like he could see the clock hanging above his head, ticking down to an early death.

And, it turned out, Hamilton had been an immigrant. He was from the Caribbean. Imagine that.

Lin knew, before he even started the project, that people would laugh. That was okay. He was laughing, too. This was a special kind of crazy, after all. The real question would be if they were still laughing when he was finished.

 

She doesn’t come the first year.

 

 

Lin gets to work. For a week, he’s running on that pure inspiration. And then he’s not, but he pushes through it, works like a madman because that’s how he rolls, and he performs in front of the freaking President—Obama laughed and so did everyone else, but that’s fine, Lin could hear the words he spoke anew through their ears, hear the almost-lunacy of rapping the origin story of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and he played to it, but they liked it, didn’t they? So this is fine, for now, it’s enough—and then he’s a few songs deep and on _My Shot_ , writing and writing, but it falls to the wayside, buried in the papers of a hundred other projects, and sometimes he takes his notes out and stares at a blinking cursor or a page half-full of doodles. He scribbles and crosses out phrases in his notepad, over and over, feeling as stuck as he’s ever been.

At the end of every project, he’s back at his piano, staring at the music rest where he taped a picture he printed out of a Hamilton family portrait, pencil balanced on his nose and fingers moving restlessly over the keys, trying to see through the veneer of propriety and distance that hangs like a veil over every old-timey portrait. Words and melodies flit through his head, but nothing concrete, nothing that fits.

He spends a very long time at that piano, trying to piece together research and thoughts and motivations, re-writing the same songs again and again, dragging himself forward inch by agonizing inch. It’s infuriating. There’s so much there, but it’s locked where he can’t get at it. Lin sits at his piano and looks closer and closer at the portrait, tries to see through that awful veil and find the fire that he knows blazed in so many of these people’s lives--

A liver-spotted hand pulls the picture off the rest, and he barely has time to react before someone is turning his shoulder, and he’s staring up into a face that he has spent hours and hours trying to puzzle out--she left so goddamn little behind, what can he do?

Elizabeth Schuyler-Hamilton is looking calmly down at him, cloudy, aged eyes serene and a smile quirking the corner of her lips.

 

 

She doesn’t ask questions, and neither does he. There’s something going on, something that runs deep and strong and a little delicate, and Lin doesn’t know if she’s a hallucination or a ghost or something else entirely, but she is here, staring at him with ready eyes, and it doesn’t matter when there is so much work to be done.

 

 

They go to the library archives--if Eliza's a ghost, well, people don’t pass through her on the street, they don’t notice her but they don’t not notice her. Their eyes just skim over her, sometimes lingering and sometimes not. But no one comments on her two-hundred-year-old dress. No one goes near her. People part around her, and she moves through the crowd as easily as a shark slices through water, and Lin has never had such a simple travelling through the city as he has walking a pace behind her—and they read through Hamilton’s letters, documents, essays, papers, as many and as much as they can. Thousands of pages, acres and acres of words and letters, and it makes Lin squirm with insufficiency, almost. But he wants to, has to, get this thing right, and if that means he can’t produce one-tenth of what Hamilton wrote in his lifetime, well, he’ll have to learn to live with placing quality above quantity.

Hamilton was the smartest guy in any room he was in, and the guy knew it. To write for him, Lin needs to be able to think that way. He needs to write from that perspective...even though the rooms Hamilton was in tended to include people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and holy shit, how the hell is he supposed to do this?

Eliza slips a pair of cheap, latex gloves onto her hands, and hands another pamphlet to Lin. _Research_ , right, that’s how they’re going to do this. Read enough of a man’s writings, and hopefully, he’ll be able to speak with his voice, pour a long-dead man into an actor the same way he poured so much of what he knows into Usnavi and everyone else who lives in the Heights. And now, the Hamiltons and company. One at a time. Essay by essay, letter by letter, piece by piece.

The librarians and patrons ignore Eliza just like everyone outside did, but she’s a tremendous help, withered fingers ruffling through page after page, plucking out a constant stream of vital nuggets of information. Sometimes, she’ll bring him sheaves of papers, whispering, “He was very proud of these, you know,” or, “I think you can get a real understanding of how he felt about Lafayette here.” She points out things he’s missed, comments on turns of phrase, and between the two of them, over months and years of work and countless pages of letters and drafts and notes, he starts to get a sense of the man, the same asy you get a feel for a person if you speak with them and hear the way they spin words off their tongue. Or, in this case, off their pen. Like the portrait, it's all covered in a veil of two-hundred-and-something years of separation and cultural differences and history, but the longer you stare, Lin is starting to realize, the more translucent you realize that veil really is.

 

 

When they start on the part where she first appears in the musical, Eliza grows quiet. She’s always been close-mouthed, almost ethereal in the sweep of her long dress and the noiselessness of her footsteps—is that how she acted in daily life, Lin can’t help wondering, when she lived? She was wealthy and a woman, she had certain expectations, after all. Or is this new, something that only happens after one has passed on? He can’t tell, there’s so little written about her old self—but now she is almost silent. She still helps him with research, still offers him occasional advice, but...when he decides that this Angelica's relationship with Alexander will be that she holds not-so-secret feelings for him, Eliza is standing next to him, watching him work, and he feels her eyes rest on his back as she judges him, takes his measure and turns it around in her head. But for now, she remains quiet.

There are certain storytelling decisions one must make, he tells her, he tells himself. He’s writing a musical, not a biography. Artistic license. In the end, isn’t he rewriting history, anyway? Taking the bare bones, the story beats, of Alexander Hamilton and turning him into something that Lin and modern America could understand and see as a hero?

It’s already not the truth. The way things are, the way they are recorded, no one can ever know the full truth. This is necessary, and he looks into her old eyes as he says this and tries to convince himself, too.

When’s he got a prototype of _Satisfied_ down, he performs it for her, gaze tense. She twitches her shoulders, shakes, and then, it’s as if something stiff in her has come undone. For the first time in months, she opens her mouth to speak. Lin is almost scared. But instead of a curse or criticism, she just slumps and sighs, tired and sad and a little amused, maybe, and then shakes her head, exasperated. Then:

“There is somewhere I’d like to go.”

 

 

They visit Angelica and Peggy and Alexander’s graves (standing at their tombstones, Eliza beside him, he feels like he almost knows them), and then Mr. Schyuler’s, and at all of them, Lin lays a bouquet selected by Eliza down and holds her hand tightly. At the last--her father’s--she stays an especially long time, still as a statue as she stares down at what lies below. There is a question in the way she holds herself, in the way she gazes down at the grave. A degree of separation that does not make sense. She looks just a bit forlorn standing there, a dress from a distant era draped around her like the wrinkles that line her face.

When she moves to leave, Lin pulls a rose from the bouquet they just placed and lays it at Eliza’s feet with great aplomb. She starts, then laughs and swats his shoulder, then gives him a hug. She’s much, much lighter than she looks, and she smells of old pages and dirt and rotted wood.

 

 

When they get back to his house from the graveyard, it’s like a floodgate has opened. They’ve barely walked into the study, and out of her mouth suddenly pours information, stories and ideas, a thousand things he already knows from months and years of research ring differently in her voice, and a million things he’s never imagined spark into existence. She speaks, long and low and proud and more verbose than he could ever have guessed, and he sits on the floor by his desk and feverishly takes notes. He is entranced by her eyes. They are ablaze with passion, absent of the quiet serenity that has possessed her for the past years.

She doesn’t speak fast and loud, the way people wrote Alexander did. She speaks quiet enough that he needs to listen carefully to hear her, and slowly, so that he can take in every word she says and absorb it before she moves on to the next.

She says very little about Alexander Hamilton, in truth. Mostly, she talks about time. Time, and fifty years, and how they were not enough and _nothing_ would have ever been enough.

He re-writes _Satisfied_ and pretty much every other song Eliza and her sisters starred in from the ground up, and finishes _Satisfied_ for good not long after. He launches into the next portion of the show still on fire with energy, like Eliza's eyes had lit something in him, too.

 

 

As time trickles by, Eliza comes less and less frequently. He is years past the block that was _My Shot_ , past the falters and the laughter, past the insecurities that have cropped up as a consequence of him attempting to adapt such a legendary slice of American history into a hip-hop musical, and although he can only rarely bring himself to believe he’ll create something as amazing as what he set out to make, the flow of the creative process is picking up momentum.

He has most of the research he needs, anyway.

So she pops in only occasionally. When she does show up, he tells her about his latest idea, or sings her his his newest song and watches for the faint smile that means he’s nailed it or the stern look that means _not quite there_. She doesn’t say much, anymore. She doesn’t need to. She’s told him what she wanted to; no more, no less. Another difference between her and her husband—she knows when to open her mouth and when to stop talking. Eliza knows that not everything needs a grand declaration, that there is power in holding your tongue.

Lin makes a note.

 

 

She is never gone so long as the stretch he is working on the songs of Alexander Hamilton’s betrayal and Philip Hamilton’s death. She does not appear once, and he is left to decipher what will become _Burn_ by himself, and that is one of the hardest things he has done yet, because while he has an almost ridiculous surplus of information for _Hurricane_ and _The Reynold’s Pamphlet_ , for Eliza, he has nothing.

For Eliza, he must build a woman’s motivations for leaving so little behind of herself out of nothing but thin air.

Or maybe, Lin thinks with a jolt, stale ashes and carbon dioxide.

She comes, the instant he puts down his pen, and he sings all of the songs he realizes now that she has been waiting for him to finish, a blend of betrayal and stupidity and mistakes that is probably uniquely painful to her. When he is done, he glares at her, daring her to disagree with what he built out facts and theories and, in many glaring spots, prominent nothingness.

She doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t frown. Instead, she wipes away the tears that suddenly are clinging to the corners of her eyes, then sits on the floor and covers her face with her hands.

Lin slowly places the notebook he’d been referring to back on his desk, and goes to sit next to her for a while. When she finally looks up, the wrinkles on her face seem a little less deeply set, and her snowy hair suddenly has a streak of rich brown in it. Eliza is younger, just a bit, but the look in her eyes is still ancient.

She gazes at him, long and slow, and tries to make that faint smile. But her muscles aren't working, he can see. Her cheeks pull and pull, but her mouth stays a sober line. In the end, she just pries open her jaw enough for a brief, “Okay,” to whisper out.

Then, Eliza disappears.

 

 

Every time he sees her, she looks a little younger. But, Lin is slowly starting to realize—as he approaches the finish line song by song by song, as he starts talks about casting and performances and musicians and prop designers and stages and choreographers, as something that had almost seemed to exist solely in his head as a private sort of _thing_ begins to blend back into the real world—she doesn’t look like the portraits of her when she was young. Eliza looks different. And…is her skin darker?

It doesn’t give Lin the idea; it confirms something he’s been thinking about for a while. After all, he’s rewriting history, rewriting a man’s ideals, rewriting relationships and dynamics and all sorts of things. The America that _Hamilton_ will be set in is going to exist in modern day as much as over two hundred years ago, and it’s for _both_ audiences. It’s for the people who created the music he loves so much. It’s for everyone.

But, well...there’s a certain kind of everyone that Broadway already has quite the surplus of, isn’t there? And honestly, he's got an awful lot of tipped scales to make up for.

They put out the casting calls, and Lin can’t stop smiling.

 

 

An hour after they cast Phillipa Soo, he’s washing his hands in the men’s bathroom when he notices in the mirror that Soo's doppelgänger is standing behind him. Eliza still has that same serene look in her eyes she had when she first arrived, but it’s edged with fire now, and accompanied by the small smile she always seem to be wearing these days. He dries his hands and approaches her, just a little shy.

“How is it?” he asks.

She smiles more widely and says, “Good luck," then disappears.

The next day, he decides to play Alexander Hamilton. He’s said another man's words, ran his thoughts through his head, too many times. Lately, when Lin raps Alexander's lines, he often feels like he’s talking about himself.

 

 

The morning before the show opens, they go to see the orphanage one more time. They’ve been there before, of course, though they didn’t go in, just sat outside in the car and looked at it for a while. Eliza drank the building and the children that scurried around it in like water.

They don’t go in now, either, but instead park the car and lean on the fence, staring at the orphanage: Eliza Schuyler-Hamilton (except suddenly Phillipa Soo’s twin) in a hundred-and-fifty year old dress that’s loose on her in all of the places it would have fit a woman of ninety-seven, and Lin-Manuel Miranda in jeans and a t-shirt, the hair that he has been growing out for this role swept back in a ponytail.

He’s really, really glad the costume designer didn’t go with wigs.

There is silence. It’s early, and the world is still asleep for the most part, the orphanage full of slumbering children and caretakers, and then the birds begin to sing, and then, so does he.

It’s Eliza’s song, the one he wrote for her, the one that needed to close the show. Nothing else would do. He’s sung it to her before—she cried the first time, and gave him the widest, toothiest smile he has ever seen her wear—and he sings it now, staring at that sign that still proclaims the orphanage’s name proudly.

Eliza’s greatest, proudest work.

After all, what’s the end of a show without a finale?

After a line or two, she joins in, and her voice is still her old voice, so the song doesn’t sound anywhere near as beautiful as it does when Phillipa Soo sings it, but they’re not performing right now. They sing the song once, and then again when Lin begs her to, so that he can memorize perfectly how he got the actual Eliza Schuyler-Hamilton to sing a duet of the song he wrote for with him, and how it sounded in her voice, and how she smiled while she sang it, almost as if it had been worth the hundred-and-fifty years it took her to find someone who would listen to her and then reply with a fraction of what the Hamiltons had.

When it is done, she smiles, wide, excited, a little nervous and then reaches out her hand. He clasps it, and they shake hands, firm at the palm and gentle at the fingertips. At the same time, they both say, “Thanks,” and then, “You’re welcome!” and they laugh. The breeze winds its way around them.

And then she is gone.

 

 

He takes the notes he took on Eliza’s soliloquies and locks them safely away in the bottom drawer of his desk. The next day, the first curtain rises, and Lin-Manuel Miranda and a cast of thousands sing the story of the Hamiltons, because history remembers.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of feelings about history and remembering and "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story". And well, Lin didn't exactly write _Hamilton_ by himself in reality--but he and the laundry list of people who helped him were all kind of channeling Eliza, right? 
> 
> Constructive criticism is welcomed.
> 
> Check out [my tumblr ](http://noip13.tumblr.com/) if you'd like.


End file.
